Genetic Diversity in a Collection

[Pythonfriend]

if one in 1000 animals are carriers for a recessive gene, even without inbreeding, one in a million will be a visible recessive. the natural population is gigantic, so it would show up every now and then. so thats no evidence for anything. then there are big breeding farms in africa, which have a more limited gene pool.

its just a guess, but i would not be surprised at all if males in the wild start fighting as soon as they reach sexual maturity, or maybe the adult male will drive them away.

i do believe reptiles to be somewhat more resilient when it comes to inbreeding. that doesnt mean that there wont be any negative consequences at all. if a python has a diverse genome, its immune system will have more solutions to deal with disease. so the immune system is weakened by inbreeding. which means the BP looks completely fine, but the risks that it dies from an infection may be a bit elevated. which is something you dont notice at all, until its too late. another thing that happens is that fertility goes down, this is more obvious, and i have heared breeders confirm it. if you do a lot of inbreeding (lets say you are working on a triple recessive), after a while you can notice fertility in the project going down. add new blood and it goes back up.

so i think genetic health is a real issue. and while you can get away with ignoring it for a generation or two, you should not ignore it completely.

most big breeders seem to care about the issue and say that they are taking active steps to minimize inbreeding. fortunately, the larger the collection is, the easier it gets to avoid inbreeding. as the collection size goes up, the amount of possible pairing grows exponentially, and much faster than the amount of pairings that would lead to inbreeding. with a large enough collection, its even possible to do a double recessive project without inbreeding.

Bill Brant from Gourmetrhodent has a gigantic collection, and he has a computer system in place that calculates the inbreeding coefficient for every animal in the collection, and for each hatchling he gets a number that tells him how strongly the genetics of the hatchling are already represented in the collection. basically the system calculates how closely related the hatchling is to every other snake in the collection. and he uses it to inform his decisions on what to hold back. so, some breeders REALLY invest A LOT of effort and brainpower to make sure inbreeding is under control.